When showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse finished the first draft ofthe season finale script, it was 80 pages long -- about 25 pages morethan a typical teleplay for the show. And thus a two-hour season finalewas born.

"We had an eight-hour story planned [for the second half of the season]that got condensed to five initially as a result of the strike,"Lindelof told reporters on a conference call Thursday (April 17)."Trying to cram all that story in -- around the finale, the rubber hitthe road, and we realized that it all felt very rushed and we wereshortchanging the emotional moments, the character moments.

"So we read the 80-page first draft ... and we said, 'There's no waywe're going to be able to cut this down to a 55-page script. Why don'twe expand it to 100?'"

The "Lost" finale, titled "There's No Place Like Home," willactually be a three-part story, beginning with the May 15 episode andconcluding with a two-hour event on Thursday, May 29 (the show is offon May 22 to make room for the finale of "Grey's Anatomy"). Lindelofand Cuse strongly suggested that the finale will reveal how the Oceanic6 come to leave the island and the ramifications it has for thosecharacters and those left behind.

"All I can say is, Sawyer isn't one of the Oceanic 6 and Jack and Kateare," Lindelof says, referring to the ongoing love triangle betweenJosh Holloway's, Evangeline Lilly's and Matthew Fox's characters. "Itwill obviously be a huge focus in the final three hours of the showthat comprise the finale in terms of how that series of eventstranspires, and ultimately what happens to Sawyer."

Among the things that may not be revealed by season's end, however, arethe backstories of the "freighter folk," the new characters introducedat the top of the season. "Because the season got shortened, one thingwe didn't get to do as much as we planned was tell the story of thefreighter folk," he says. "Some of that will be deferred to nextseason."

The two showrunners are also hoping to, as Lindelof puts it, leaveviewers asking "What the hell are they gonna do?" with the finale,hinting at another possible change in the narrative structure of theshow.

"There might come a time in the show where the word 'flash' becomesirrelevant," Lindelof says. "If you stop and think about what we'vedone this year, there's the story on the island which we perceive to bethe present, then there's the story of the Oceanic 6, which ishappening off the island in the future.

"But if you were to switch perspectives and were off the island,focusing on the Oceanic 6 trying to get back, that would be thepresent, and what happened back on the island would be either aparallel present, a possible future a possible past, who knows. Whenyou hear the 'whoosh' noise, the question becomes, Where does it takeyou?"